Carl Story

Guitarist, fiddler, and vocalist Carl Story earned the nickname "The Father of Bluegrass Gospel Music" across a career that spanned many decades. Although his profile never reached the heights attained by Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, and the rest of bluegrass's first generation, he stood at the genre's formation and exerted considerable sway for years; his ensembles functioned as an apprenticeship for numerous emerging players. Story entered the world to parents already devoted to music who performed at square dances, so he picked up both fiddle and guitar in childhood. During his teenage years, string-band sounds captured his interest, leading to radio work in Lynchburg, VA, in the early 1930s. Around 1935 he and young banjoist Johnnie Whisnant relocated to Spartanburg, SC, joining the Lonesome Mountaineers, a group that later gave rise to the Rambling Mountaineers. The ensemble broadcast across southern stations until Story departed in 1942 to replace drafted fiddler Howdy Forrester in Bill Monroe & his Blue Grass Boys. Drafted himself into the U.S. Navy the following year, Story returned to civilian life and rebuilt the Rambling Mountaineers with Jack Shelton, Curley Shelton, Hoke Jenkins, and Claude Boone. Personnel shifted steadily; several alumni, among them Tater Tate and Red Rector, later became prominent bluegrass figures. Beginning in 1947 Story and the band cut both secular and gospel material for Mercury and stayed with the label through 1952. The next year he moved to Columbia and issued more than a dozen singles. The defining bluegrass chapter of his recording life opened in the late 1950s after the group signed with Starday, fusing the "high lonesome" Monroe style with gospel harmonies and the crisp picking of Story and his sidemen. Across roughly ten albums issued into the early 1970s, gospel material dominated. The 1963 release Mighty Close to Heaven blended energetic tracks such as "You Don't Love God [If You Don't Love Your Neighbor]" with songs that applied bluegrass's poetic imagery to fervent declarations of faith, including the title song in which Story recalls coming "mighty close to heaven with my tears." Story and the band became regulars on the bluegrass festival circuit and continued touring after he settled into semi-retirement in Greer, SC, just outside Greenville, where he worked as a disc jockey. When he passed in 1995, bluegrass luminaries from Bill Monroe downward attended his funeral.